Spider Woman writes:
> I am also trying to find information on a professor from
> a southern American university who did a study in the
> late sixties or early seventies that seemed to show that
> blacks were academically inferior to whites. I think his
> name was Alfred Jensen, or Albert Johnson, or something
> like that, but I am not having any luck with it.
You’re presumably thinking of Arthur Jensen, although he didn’t teahc in the South.
O.K., that was supposed to be “teach,” not “teahc”.
Rushton is a psychologist with tenure at the University of Western Ontario, London, ON. He’s been spewing his nonsense since at least the late 1980’s and I can’t believe that anybody still gives him credit. I’m no expert but I can certainly see the flaws in his methodology such as sampling errors, confusing correlation with causation, and completely ignoring potential environmental factors in determing performance on IQ tests.
Here’s a review of Race, Evolution, and Behavior by J. Philippe Rushton. Here’s the final paragraph, “The low standards of scholarship evident in this book render it largely irrelevant for modern science. The main question it raises in my mind is a sociological one: Why is so much attention devoted in the mass media to a work of this quality?” Also, here’s a link to excerpts from the Anthro-L Archive re: Rushton. BTW, thanks for making me aware of that archive Collounsbury. Fascinating (even if 90% of it flies over my head).
Like Collounsbury, I too have heard rumours that he falsfied data. Unfortuneately I haven’t been able to dig up any cites. Anybody else have better luck? Frankly, I think it’s easy enough to discredit Rushton without charging him with fabricating data.
Cheers,
Hodge
Go to the site, review the discourse, including the subject being brought up itself. If Rushton thinks its libelous, and had a basis, he could have brought down the archive years ago. The material dates from 1997. Now I wish that I had archived the Kent Univ. materials, which included fascimiles of the materials, exchanges with Rushton and his sudden silence when nabbed with the fabrication (i.e. lack of replies to follow up communications). But the thing was up for years so…
In any case, the literature is clear.
As for racial variation of penises:
We’ve got four problems here:
(a) lack of any real data worth the adjective scientific.
(b) fallacy of composition (i) i.e. the japanese data is assumed representative of the larger (ii) condom size marketed reflects actual variation in penis size versus societal expectations --i.e. we need to consider the concept of Americans being more dick obsessed and thinking they need more room for their better parts (iii) partial data from the US is representative --mind you the differences mentioned in the Kinsey data seem to fall well within the likely margin of error for any such survey. Here Cecil is clearing falling down.
© the genetics which don’t suggest any way in which any particular attribute, size, height, balls, would vary by race. By specific populations, sure, but that’s a much smaller scale than race. It may even be by some chance that among darker skinned people from Africa, that we find the one group with the biggest dongs and by chance the Japanese and nearby Asians contain populations unlucky enough to have the smallest. But again, the structure of human genetics renders the idea of coherent variation of penises (my god do I really have to explain this, about pensises!!!) by race laughable.
(d) Is this relevant to anything at all?
I mean come on folks, does anyone with a smidgen of understanding of population biology and evolution take seriously an idjit who argues penis size reflects intelligence by population? The fallacies are legion.
(Sometimes this topic just gets beyond stupid.)
PS: Hodge, you’re quite welcome. There were other matierials I heard about to, but whatever, as you say, we hardly need fabrication to refute this ultra-maroon.
My apologies,
I believe the official archive will be more useful for those seeking to learn more about Rushton’s lack of academic integrity.
Here is a link to a favorable review of one of Arthur Jensen’s books (Wendell Wagnoner was right; he has been at Berkely for some time and not some southern university) and here is a link to the AltaVista search results for Arthur Jensen.
This review of the book does nothing to dispell my original opinion, that the studies he did could not accurately determine the true difference in intelligence between races, because there is no way to hold all factors constant except race. If you study scores and performance in schools and universities, you are not taking into account the difference in advantages and opportunities for learning, and many other possible factors, such as nutrition and other physical and emotional health issues. This is possibly not mentioned in the review of the book, because it comes from a website on eugenics, which according to Webster’s is “the science that deals with the improvement of race and breeds, especially the human race, through the control of hereditary factors.” I believe that this is what Hitler was studying in concentration camps during WWII, and why such studies are really scary to me.
Interestingly enough, this link, which is entitled “Arthur Jensen’s new Book proves that Jews are far more intelligent than Asians” comes up “content blocked.” Jensen’s studies have caused more than a little dissension and rancor, and many people still discount his studies and findings. I question his motives as to why he has been trying to prove racial superiority all these years, while other scientists are downplaying the concept of race itself.
Okay, here is a source you might also want to look at for some content and ideas. It’s from the June 5, 2000 issue of “The Nation.” It’s not available online, as far as I know, but a library would have the paper copy. An excerpt:
"What explains the racial gap in academic performance of high-school students? Pedro A. Noguera, a professor of education at Harvard University, and Antwi Akom, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, offer a number of explanations. They start with economic disadvantage. Many minority children “are educated in schools that are woefully inadequate on most measures of quality and funding.”
"But the authors also analyze the reasons many middle-class minority students – educatedin diverse, well-financed schools – do not perform as well academically as their white counterparts. ‘Missing from the research and policy debates is an understanding of the ways in which children come to perceive the relationship between their racial identity and what they believe they can do academically,’ the authors write. ‘In schools where few minority students are enrolled in [Advanced Placement] courses, even students who meet the criteria for enrollment may refuse to take such courses out of concern that they will become isolated from their peers.’
“It will take a variety of measures – some economic and others social – to narrow or close the racial performance gap,’ they add. ‘When placed within the broader context of race relations in American society, the causes of the racial achievement gap appear less complexand mysterious; the gap is merely another reflection of the disparities in experience and life chances for individuals from different racial groups.’”
I don’t have an opinion on this, just pointing the way to another source that may not be as hard to track down as more academic stuff.